IV drip stations in Japan are good for what ails ya

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After a night of “hard living” back in my days as a bachelor in the exciting city of Minneapolis (circa 2002), my buddy and I were picking up our cars from the parking lot of the bar we’d been drinking at the night before.

The bar was inside a quasi-mall-type-thing (Calhoun Square, for those of you familiar with Minneapolis) and we’d caught wind of a new oxygen kiosk gone up in the middle of the thoroughfare a few days prior.

We stopped to chat with the lady running the thing and she’d (correctly) noticed that we both looked a little worse for wear. After some hemming and hawing, I found myself wearing a plastic tube around my face with two little nozzles shoved up my nose, inhaling deeply. After about ten minutes, I felt like a million bucks.

As of about a month ago, a service called Tenteki10 became available in Tokyo’s Ebisu Garden Place Tower. The IV bar is operated in conjunction with a medical office there, so the drips are administered by medical professionals, although none of it is covered by health insurance. According to Japan Today…

“Many people daily suffer from exhaustion, insomnia and backaches on a daily basis because they don’t take proper care of themselves,” says a doctor at Tenteki10. “They try supplements, home remedies or cheap energy injections. Some of these ailments cannot be healed that way and could possibly develop into more serious illnesses, including depression.”

But the service at Tenteki10 is not “cosmetic,” the doctor adds. “It’s ‘preventive medicine.’ Also, we don’t publicize this service like a business, nor do we suggest it to anyone. We just leave leaflets at the clinic. We think of it as an option for people to raise their awareness of daily health management on their own.”